How Not To Be a Boy

by Robert Webb

‘Quiet boy’, ‘painfully shy’, ‘you never know he’s there’: these are some of the phrases I catch grown-ups using when they talk about me.

Communal showering is a fresh hell that concludes every Games lesson the way an awkward exchange of details concludes a car crash.

The great thing about refusing to feel feelings is that, once you’ve denied them, you don’t have to take responsibility for them. Your feelings will be someone else’s problem – your mother’s problem, your girlfriend’s problem, your wife’s problem. If it has to come out at all, let it come out as anger. You’re allowed to be angry. It’s boyish and man-like to be angry.

Winningly, there is nothing in his demeanour to suggest an interest in screwing other women or hitting children. For Mum, this makes him a veritable prince amongst men.

A seven-year-old in pursuit of the Paramount Objective of Despising Girls finds it all conveniently laid out for him: the culture, the language – it’s really no effort.

So – the thing or two I know about luck. Thing number one: you should do your best to notice luck so that you don’t accidentally take credit for it. Thing number two: luck is not your fault.

When it comes to the gaining of genuine confidence and genuine self-respect, even the supposed default humans need a surprising amount of encouragement. What they need, like everyone else, is a) one thing to be good at, and b) one person to notice.

When you’re famous, people look at you like they’re trying to figure something out.

It could be a male thing, a working-class thing, a British thing or a human thing. But sometimes you’re in the middle of a big mistake and you just keep going for the allotted time.

Applies to some many things... including Brexit

Anyway, although I am now happy to admit that ‘When Will I Be Famous’ is a vital and compelling teen anthem, I had my reasons for loathing that song in particular and Bros in general. All the girls in my year wanted to shag Bros. And none of them showed the first sign of wanting to shag me.

The stereotype of the Nagging Wife has proved very useful to those of us who are often the primary cause of all the nagging: the Useless Husband.

That is what bereavement feels like to me. A wide-eyed rush towards a painful impact.

You can get away with some amazingly bad behaviour, it turns out, as long as your predecessors were complete shits.

All this requires a lot of lying. Frankly, it’s hard work. I put so much creativity into my excuses for doing nothing that it sometimes occurs to me that it might have been easier just to read the sodding book or write the sodding essay in the first place.

No, sir. No, lads. No, Daddy. That won’t help us and it won’t help anyone else. Men in trouble are often in trouble precisely because they are trying to Get a Grip and Act Like a Man. We are at risk of suicide because the alternative is to ask for help, something we have been repeatedly told is unmanly.

It will be some time before I realise that in acting, as in many jobs, a) you get better results when you collaborate instead of compete, and b) given the choice, only cunts prefer to compete.

The plan was simple. What you did was, you wrote to lots of private schools that you suspected of having more money than sense. You used headed notepaper and kept mentioning Cambridge University. Charles worked out a budget that would not only allow us all to get weekly wages (money for acting!) but would leave enough cash to fund a four-week run in a small London theatre.

And my views of baby-boomer, non-college-educated, slightly racist, deeply sexist, angry white working-class Tories were tempered by having one as a dad. This is the kind of forced empathy that villages, not just families, are rather good at.